The power of terrain: The affective materiality of planet Earth in the age of revolution

Abstract

This commentary analyzes Stuart Elden’s contributions to a theory of terrain and proposes to further politicize them through a bodily, materialist, and non-anthropocentric examination of the severity of the climate crisis and of the ways in which grassroots movements struggling for radical change are empowered by their engagement with terrain. In particular, I argue in dialogue with Elden that this perspective requires an affective and non-Eurocentric examination of ‘the power of terrain’: that is, the irreducible capacity of the terrain of planet Earth, on the one hand, to severely disrupt human places and territories amid global warming and, on the other, to facilitate collective mobilizations for social, climate, gender, and racial justice.

The limits of territory and terrain

“…It certainly wasn’t suggesting that the two were synonymous, and nor was it suggesting territory was the only, or even the best, way into the question of terrain. In this, I certainly agree with Gastón Gordillo’s (2021) point that ‘territory is not enough to grasp terrain’, and I am interested to see how he develops this work on terrain itself in his promised future book.…”

“…Kimberley Peters (2021) draws some very interesting connections between the work I did here and debates about place. Gordillo (2021) also suggests that place is absent from my review. In my earlier work on territory, I learned much from work on the concept and practice of place, both within geography and outside the discipline.…”

Interdisciplinary research in hazards and disaster risk

“…The debates around the Anthropocene have brought many of these issues to light. The recognition that the geology of the Anthropocene is inherently political (Castree 2014a, 2014b) raises a number of important questions for hazards geography: it further opens up the realm of hazards to social study (Bobbette and Donovan 2019; Clark 2011), not only through science studies of hazard and risk assessment processes (Demeritt et al 2013; Morss et al 2005) and scientific institutions (Donovan and Oppenheimer 2015; Ogra et al 2021) but also in the everyday and embodied experiences of hazardous environments (Coates 2022; Donovan 2021a; Gordillo 2021). The development of agent-based modelling and machine-learning techniques has also, conversely, led to a greater drive within the physical sciences to model social processes (Costa, Haukaas and Chang 2021; Ghaffarian et al 2021; Wang and Zhang 2019).…”